


time went on for everybody else (she won't know it)

by prestonsarchives



Category: The Haunting of Bly Manor (TV)
Genre: F/F, I'm still sad and it's been three months, look okay i had to, taylor's bonus tracks came out and there was simply no other option
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-01-11
Updated: 2021-01-11
Packaged: 2021-03-15 07:53:48
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,671
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28685145
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/prestonsarchives/pseuds/prestonsarchives
Summary: Jamie Taylor is dead.Jamie Taylor is dead, but not gone — Jamie wakes up, in fact, and discovers she hasn't gone anywhere at all.She's back at Bly.Finding Dani is all that there is left to do.
Relationships: Dani Clayton/Jamie
Comments: 33
Kudos: 160





	time went on for everybody else (she won't know it)

**Author's Note:**

> happy reading :)

* * *

_all these people think love's for show_

_but I would die for you in secret_

_—_ peace, ts

* * *

Jamie Taylor is dead. Of nothing more sinister than the most natural of causes — she’s grown old enough to lose her full grip on what’s there and what’s not, has started telling Flora more and more stories about this mysterious manor, and Flora still comes to listen, every week — even as she starts a family, has kids, makes memories that she won’t forget, this time.

Jamie Taylor is dead, but it isn’t painful, isn’t a worry — one night, Flora comes to visit, and there she lies, looking almost as if she’d just fallen asleep. There’s a bluish tinge to her lips, though, a faded quality that her whole body seems to have taken on — and _oh_ , because Flora doesn’t think she’s ever seen a dead body before.

(At least, she doesn’t remember being dragged into a lake by one. This is probably for the best).

Jamie Taylor is dead, but she looks as peaceful as she always does, a propped-open book on the table beside her, a Polaroid held between the mattress and the pad of her thumb. When the staff come in to offer their condolences, take the body to wherever it’s going to go, Flora allows herself a glance at the photo. It’s Jamie as she doesn’t recall seeing her, so young that her hair still hung in unkempt ringlets rather than as flat as it does now, so young that there was a bandana in her curls and a glint in her eyes that Flora’s never seen. Not in Jamie. Not in the strange woman who turned up at Flora’s wedding, the one who Henry seemed to recognise and Miles seemed to be entirely perplexed by. The woman who Flora had stayed in contact with after the ceremony for reasons she couldn’t quite work out, that constant feeling that they were something to each other, in a life before this.

 _You’re the coolest_ , she’d said to Jamie once, three years after the wedding — a joke, a reference to the ghost stories — and Jamie looked as if she’d actually _seen_ a ghost, in the minutes after.

The Polaroid, though. The Polaroid, and Jamie smiling, a grin freed entirely of the grief she carries around like a talisman now. And, of course, a woman. Another woman, one with eyes so glaringly full of love that Flora almost doesn’t notice the way one is blue and one is brown, one with a smile so absolutely radiant that it’s not hard at all to see what Jamie means when she speaks of a beautiful, perfect face.

It’s a photo, and they’re stood in front of a shop — The Leaf-something, because Jamie’s head’s obscuring the rest of its name — and they’re happier than any couple Flora’s ever seen before. There’s a pang of something akin to jealousy, deep in her chest, because she knows that even with the husband and the kids she holds so dear — she’ll never know a love like this.

She slips the Polaroid into Jamie’s pocket with a crinkle, slides a strand of Jamie’s hair out of the way of her face, wonders when exactly the grief is going to hit for this woman who accidentally ended up raising her like a mother. Hours later, she’ll be sat in a bathtub weeping, her husband’s arms around her, _I’m so sorry_ as if it can change a thing, as if it could shift this immovable weight. Now, though, she smooths over Jamie’s sheets, flicks off a light, gathers up all of the plants which are dotted around this room. There are thirteen in total, and she ends up having to ask for help to get them all down to her car. She’ll take care of these plants, she knows. It’s what Jamie would’ve wanted.

It’s dark, where Jamie is. The darkness is _heavy,_ though, and for a moment she wonders if this is anything like the feeling Dani had to put up with, for all those years. Two souls, in a body only ever designed for one. She reaches out, watches her hand slip into the air — _air?_ — and it envelops shaking fingers as if she’d plunged them into ink. _Dani,_ she wants to call out, though as fast as the words are born, they die on the edge of her tongue. It’s a name she hasn’t let herself say for… decades. Even now, the thought of it burns a little — she exhales as if to rid herself of its taste.

She’s slept, though, and this is waking, she supposes. There’s a pattern here. A pattern, and she’s been telling the story of the woman who had to follow it for far too long. Jamie walks.

It’s a strange sort of viscosity, is this not-quite-air, swallows her in a way that should feel violently claustrophobic and — isn’t. Is _freeing,_ as if to contradict itself. She walks, and she can _feel_ herself being stripped of the silver in her hair, the tremble in her hands, the valleys which time had carved ever so delicately into her face. She walks, and gone is the shell of the ninety-three year old woman who she barely recognised anyway. She walks, and she walks, and she walks, and she stops.

“Blimey.” A test. A word which trips off her tongue as the absolute most familiar thing, and her voice — it’s _back._ That wispy, rasped quality it had taken on as the years passed; not there. She sounds like she did, _before._ She’s who she _was,_ before, and this time, when she takes another step — she’s _where_ she was. Before.

Bly is unchanged. There’s ivy trellising the wall, more of it than there was before, and the gardens are far more rambling than she ever would’ve let them get if she was still the gardener — but the _feeling._ That steady uneasiness that grows into a steadier welcomeness as she walks, towards the only house she ever really — against all of the bloody odds — would’ve called home. The gravel driveway, and her footsteps leave little imprints in the stones behind her. The front door, and it’s still as ridiculously huge as she recalls. The handle, which she twists until she hears that familiar click, the oak panels which she pushes slightly forward, steps forwards again, looks, and looks, and _sees._

“Jesus.”

The word slips — she doesn’t mean for it to, but it seems to fit, here. _Jesus,_ because she remembers _everything._ This exact hall, where Charlotte hosted parties and Flora set up performances and Dani — _Dani —_ was once dragged through by the spirit of a woman who remembered _nothing._ She can’t really bear to walk further into the house; not yet. Not too much, so much as too _big._ Too big to fathom. Too big to tie all of those memories to all of these rooms. When she turns, it’s sharp, and an elbow knocks against the door’s stone frame as she leaves. Something has shattered within Jamie, all over again.

Now, when she turns back out to face the grounds, it aches. All she can see is what _was._ Four friends drinking around a fire. Two not-quite-friends-anymore testing boundaries in a greenhouse. Three people — two siblings, and an au pair — playing hide and seek in the woods. There are names, now, surrounding her entirely and attacking, attacking, attacking, forcing themselves at her even as she shuts her eyes, digs her nails so far into her palms that it should hurt. Doesn’t. Doesn’t hurt at all.

_Henry. Charlotte. Miles. Flora. Viola. Owen. Hannah. Dani._

_Dani,_ and her eyes are open, and she’s running, sprinting, tripping, crashing into the bank of the lake, on her knees by the water and all but crawling into a thrashing swim that aches to drain her entirely. She’s here, and she’s where she was sixty years ago, praying that there won’t be a body there to greet her in the lakebed, three words breaking like a fever from her throat, _you, me, us,_ as if it’ll change a thing. Screaming, and screaming, and screaming, fighting the invisible grip that held her so steadfastly back. She’d been ready to drown, she knew then. Ready to inhale an entire lungful of water and choke on it, let it weigh her down as water does, sink into the dirt and live those last few moments as she’d always been supposed to. With Dani. Always, with Dani.

Dani, of course, hadn’t let her.

_(Dani wouldn’t.)_

But she’s here now, and there’s _nothing_ holding her back as she swims down, deep enough that her ears start to hurt, deep enough that her whole head starts to ache, and reaches. Reaches out, for the love of her life, ready to go, and go, and _stay gone._ Reaches, and—

Finds nothing.

Finds mud, and rocks, and pondweed.

 _Oh,_ because this is new.

This time, it’s not so much a matter of being forced as forcing _herself_ away from the dirt, pushing up with grit between her fingers and water in her mouth, paddling back to the mudbank and choosing not to care about how wrecked her jeans are. The lake, though fruitless, had been a welcome distraction, and the stories that had been tugging on the threads of her clothes are quieter now. Carry a lighter sort of poignancy, entirely different from the grief that had crept up earlier and ripped the breath from her lungs.

Leaves a question, though, this whole endeavour. If this _is_ Bly — and she’s fairly sure it has to be — why is there this one missing detail? Everything else is as it always was; each bush in the garden, every crack in the front windows, this dream state tailoring even to the tyre marks that her cab had left on that fateful day. The last time a car would ever roll down that driveway, haunted as this house was officially recognised to be.

Something occurs to her. Something _huge,_ something so expansive that when it collides with Jamie’s adjusting body she’s almost bowled back over into the bank. Three words. Three _fucking_ words, and they’re taking shape already, single syllabled and almost childish with the ease that they slip past the lips of her reflection.

“You.”

 _You,_ and there’s Dani, there’s a little girl with a best-friend-turned-boyfriend she’s not too sure about, there’s a blonde high schooler held high in the ranks of popularity by the stability of her relationship, there’s a terrified woman who agrees to a proposal because it’s the only thing she knows how to do. There’s an accident, there’s a transatlantic flight, there’s a manor, a gardener, a greenhouse, a kiss, a _lifetime._

“Me.”

 _Me,_ and there’s Jamie, there’s a little girl with too much hair and too many siblings to look after, there’s a brunette high schooler with a dying father and a mother who is _long_ gone, there’s an escaping woman who agrees to a job offer in the countryside because gardening is the only thing she can bring herself to do. There’s a chef, and a housekeeper, there’s an uncle, an au pair, a bedroom, a sigh, a _promise._

“Us.”

 _Us,_ and the world explodes. Shatters like burned glass around her, there are two little girls growing up side by side without even knowing it, there are two high schoolers equally as scared as each other of the things they’re starting to feel, there are two women — one running, one searching — so entirely helpless that they stumble upon the only good thing each will ever come to know. There’s a moonflower, there’s a florist, there’s a home, a ring, a reflection, a lake, an _ending._

Jamie opens her eyes, though her ears are still ringing from the blast that doesn’t seem to have affected anything apart from her. Jamie opens her eyes, and there’s a woman beside her — not _the_ woman, but certainly another soul, one she thinks she recognises from shuddered descriptions in the dark.

“You’re Viola.”

The spirit — Viola — nods, and her head hangs so heavy for a moment that the world seems to still around her.

 _“You’re_ Viola.”

There’s rage, now, pent up and packed down, but rage nonetheless. _Rage,_ Jamie wants to explain, spit the words like grit from her mouth, _because you took_ everything _from me._ She doesn’t, though. Doesn’t quite let herself fall into that familiar trap, held back only really by the weight of what she feels for the woman who is tracing nervous circles into the mud. A silence settles between them — it’s uncomfortable. Viola has that look on her face — a sort of weariness, behind the eyes — that communicates the awkwardness. She’s beautiful, Jamie realises. Beautiful in the way that ballgowns and castle corridors and sapphires are beautiful, though: a sort of untouchable regality which speaks of an _achingly_ tragic past.

“How long was it?”

Jamie starts. She’d expected an apology, really, but she’ll take the bait anyway — this is leading somewhere, probably. Has to.

“Was…”

“The time you spent. Without her.”

 _Fifty six years, eight months, twenty days and about nineteen hours,_ Jamie wants to say.

“Call it sixty years.”

Viola’s face falls, again, sympathy which Jamie would usually baulk at if the circumstances were even slightly different. They’re not, though. They’re pieces of her strung together as if to brag about how broken a soul she’d been, sitting with unshed tears on the side of the lake where the gardener had first seen her dead wife. _Not,_ she thinks, almost sarcastically, _the happiest of endings._

“I took sixty years from you?”

Guilt. _So_ much of it, dripping from the sentiment, that Jamie has to remind herself that this is the woman who killed the love of her life in order to hold back any pity she might otherwise have felt.

“Could’ve been longer. Got off lucky.”

Living to ninety-three with a hole in your side isn’t quite as _lucky_ as some people might’ve perceived, but there were thirteen years before that which she can say with absolute certainty would’ve been the happiest of _anyone’s_ life, ever. They weren’t enough, but then again, nothing really would’ve been.

“You can stay here, if you want. In Bly. I think a friend of yours went on past this stage, but it’s nice enough here.”

The complexities of there being _stages_ of the afterlife don’t hit Jamie as hard as they should do. Maybe it’s the fact that she’s dead. Maybe it’s the mention of this friend.

“Friend?”

Viola allows herself a smile, proud of her ability to pique anyone’s curiosity centuries on from her prime.

“Owen, I think. Most of the time we get last names — people are naturally self-centred, not so much a fault as an aspect of human beings — but his was a rare case. Only name in his mind was another’s.”

Jamie shuts her eyes. The ache’s back, though not entirely for Dani, this time.

“Hannah Grose?”

“Hannah Grose.”

It’s a reassurance, that Jamie wasn’t the only one who never let herself let go of the past. Held onto it, in fact, for her whole life.

“D’you know… where he went? After this?”

Viola’s smile broadens slightly, though it’s sadder, now. The sort of smile you see in memories.

“Paris. Didn’t need much convincing, once I told him she’d been there waiting the whole time.”

 _They found each other._ Hannah Grose, in Paris. She remembers the edge of that conversation she’d caught, the night by the fire, remembers not bringing it up later on for how divinely intimate it had felt. They never lost each other, really.

When the two speak again, their words collide. Jamie, with _was there anyone else,_ Viola, with _you’ll probably want to know about Danielle._

“Dani.”

The correction’s instant, comes even quicker than the realisation of what was actually said. It’s the first time she’s said the word in an eternity. Holy _shit_ , though, because Viola knows something about Dani, and Jamie is going to hang on to any snippet of information that she’s given at all.

“She in Iowa? Vermont?” A pause, and Jamie’s racking her brain. “London? Paris, too?”

Viola waits until she’s finished, looks more and more as though she might start sobbing with every one of Jamie’s desperate grabs for information.

“You loved her so much,” she says, quietly, and the sentence is the epitome of regret.

“Yeah.” Resentment, naturally, in Jamie’s voice. “Yeah, I did.”

“I’m _so_ sorry.” Viola sounds it, to be fair, the trembling breath taken before _sorry_ something which Jamie’s fairly sure isn’t anything fake.

“S’okay. Nothing we can do now.”

It’s not okay, not really. Quite possibly the most opposite thing from _okay_ Jamie’s ever known, that her lover was taken from her in so cruel a way as that. She’s picking at the skin of her thumb, not really noticing as Viola shifts, stands.

“She’s here, you know.”

Jamie’s heart stopped about an hour ago, in between the sheets of a nursing home bed — but she wouldn’t know it. It’s beating, impossibly, hammering so desperately against her ribcage that it almost hurts. When she turns — whips, really, fastest she’s ever moved to look at someone in her entire not-life — to ask Viola another question, there’s nothing at all to greet her. The realisation hits her like a sheet of glass anyway, shattering around her as she tears up from the bank, sodden trainers slapping against wet grass she’ll have to tend to later as she sprints, through foliage thicker than she remembers, gravel slipping out from under her every step. They’re not steps though, not really — leaps and bounds, maybe, longer strides than she’s ever had to take before — but she’s across the grounds in record time, soaring in through the front door she didn’t shut, crashing through a house which is too bloody _big_ for its own good. She’s tracking pond sludge across these pristine oak floorboards, she knows, and there’s a lie somewhere about _I’ll clean that up later,_ but she’s past the hall, through the living room, racing down this one remaining corridor like Miles used to whenever Owen was over to cook.

She’s started yelling, accidentally, _Dani,_ over and over and over, words flooding into the hallways faster than she can take steady breaths, but she’s sobbing now too — great heaving gasps that almost tip her over twice. _Dani,_ one last time, before she’s at the kitchen, flinging open the door, shoulder cracking into its frame as she all but staggers in.

Jamie had forgotten quite how beautiful her wife was.

She’s sat there, a mug in hand as if this were any other day — sixty odd years and _maybe,_ her tea-making skills have improved. Her hair falls in waves around her, cresting on her shoulders and framing the rest of her face in a way that Jamie has only ever seen as meaning that Dani herself is a work of art. Where her hands are steady, her eyes are not, widening, blinking, widening again, trying to wake up from what surely, surely, surely has to be a dream.

“Jamie?”

She whispers the name like she’s afraid she’s going to break something, tear the fabric of whatever this might be. Jamie nods, robbed of the ability to speak by the sobs which take her body by storm. She backs up, collides hard with the kitchen counter, uses the momentum almost to fold in on herself entirely and is _so_ close to collapsing until’s there’s the dull clash of ceramic on wood, footsteps which fly across the floor, two arms which wrap so desperately around her that she has no option but to shudder into the embrace. Two women, pressing against each other as if they’ll never get to touch again, fingers splayed out across shoulder blades, noses pressed into necks. _Jamie, Jamie, Jamie, Jamie,_ and Dani’s weeping the word as if she doesn’t believe she’s actually wished it into existence, lips ghosting across the impossible smoothness of her lover’s collarbone, clinging on as tightly as she does because she’s convinced she’ll disintegrate if she lets go too soon.

Jamie’s started to laugh, now, a disbelieving grin fighting its way amongst the tears, tugging Dani against her, burying her head into the crook of Dani’s shoulder, _Dani, Dani, Dani, Dani,_ and their names are overlapping each other in a bizarre sort of symphony she’s spent _decades_ coveting.

“You came back.” Dani whispers the words, watches the way goosebumps rise and fall in their wake on Jamie’s chest. She says it with the released weight of _you didn’t leave me,_ as in, _there was never anybody else._ Jamie nods, shifts her head up, plants a kiss at the base of Dani’s jaw where tears have started to collect. They understand each other, still. Sixty years, and they are two unchanged souls.

“I came home.”

* * *

There’s an old folktale, now, that surrounds the walls of Bly Manor. That if you visit, if you sit still enough, for long enough, and with the right lights on, you’ll see the shadow of two lovers — some say they’re dancing, others say they’re laughing with each other, the raunchiest will swear they’re locked in the most passionate kiss our finite bodies will ever live to see. That if you step foot inside, hide yourself away in the right corner and stay absolutely silent for as long as is necessary, you’ll hear cautious words on the edge of the breeze, a promise swapped from spirit to ghost, two unbidden souls who will spend eternities with each other without noticing the time passing at all. Thing is, as popular as the debate is for what exactly one can see the shadows doing — nobody argues over the words themselves. The whole town is entirely certain — the poets, the outcasts, the scientists, all combined — that they know what to listen for, whenever they come to visit. Nobody has quite the grasp on their _meaning,_ of course, but given the circumstances, that’s probably for the best. It’s simple, really.

_You._

_Me._

_Us._

**Author's Note:**

> helloooo sapphics this was an hour of me being gay and sad and projecting into my tumblr drafts so I'm assuming the fic's absolutely riddled with typos and grammatical errors BUT comments and kudos are still very appreciated even if you're popping in to correct me on any mistakes :)


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